On Sunday Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) will reveal the first revision to its flagship database program in five years, along with an expanded line of high-end servers.

This announcement comes at a time of increased competition from companies like Salesforce.com Inc. (NYSE:CRM), Workday Inc. and SAP AG (NYSE:SAP).

Co-President of the company, Mark Hurd said that Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison will present the company’s new 12c database, designed for cloud computing, on Sept. 30 at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. The new database product and more powerful systems are designed to help enterprises deal with the huge increases in data they are collecting.

But there is more going on than just the new database version. From last week’s Q1 2013 earnings announcement: “A little more than a week from now we will announce lots of enhancements to the Oracle Cloud,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “There are more CRM, ERP and HCM applications as a service, and more Oracle database, Java and social network platform services. Our new infrastructure as a service is available in the Oracle Cloud and as a private cloud in our customers’ data center, with the unique ability to move applications and services back and forth between the two.”

What Mr. Ellison is saying is that they have a lot more going on in this area and he expects for it to help drive Oracle’s growth. And in the last sentence quoted above the clause “unique ability to move applications and services back and forth between the two” appears to be a dig at rivals such as Salesforce.com and Work who use a no-hardware approach. With Oracle, customers will have the option to use their own cloud, the Oracle Cloud – or a combination.